Saturday, 6 September 2014

PAUL GASCOIGNE, ALAS.

Paul Gascoigne once told reporters ‘I don’t make
predictions, and I never will’. Writing about football means making predictions
all the time. I don’t get many right. Sadly one of those I did was about
Gascoigne himself in this piece from a 1996 issue of When Saturday Comes.

A few years after writing it I interviewed Evan Bryson who
ran Redheugh Boys Club, where Gascoigne’s erratic career began. Evan - who died in 2011 - was a
lovely man. Retired after years working in a carpet factory, he was devoted to
helping the community he’d grown up in. I asked Evan if he’d known Gascoigne well. ‘I
got to know him a bit, aye,’ he said, ‘Because when he was ten, eleven, his Dad
would bring him along for the evening training sessions. Then he’d go off down
to the social club and quite often he’d forget to come back and get him. He was
a little lad, it was dark and it was a long walk home, so I’d give him a lift
back in the car.’

Gascoigne’s behaviour has been abhorrent on far too
many occasions. Yet there is still something about him of that little boy, left
behind, reliant on the kindness of strangers.

To my mind Gascoigne is the
best player England produced since Bobby Charlton, the only one of genuine world class. His close control and
dribbling were a thing of genius, his passing was incisive, he struck
a free kick as well as anybody and yet….

When talking of the Geordie midfielder, Brian Glanville was
fond of borrowing Charles Saint-Beuve's comment about the state of mid-19th Century French literature: ‘When asked to name the greatest writer of
the present day, I am forced to reply, ‘Victor Hugo, alas!’

When Channel 4 broadcast the documentary Gazza’s
Coming Home last month, it seemed it might herald a change in the media’s
perception of Britain’s most written about footballer. Gascoigne, it appeared,
had reached a crossroads in his life and for once hadn’t responded by dashing
headlong down the route signposted “Total Disaster – This Way”. He was fully fit,
newly married, playing well for club and country. Most importantly of all he
had become a Dad.

In the mythology of football the appearance of a
baby in a player’s life is almost always the cue for an epiphany. Paul Ince, we
are reminded, is a calmer, wiser, altogether more rounded fellow since the
birth of his son four years ago; a late-night call from a weeping child marked
the turning point for Paul Merson.

It is a touching notion, that of the burly wastrel redeemed by the innocent
babe. It must be a believable one, too – after all, it is the cornerstone of
Christianity. The image of Gazza wrestling with the pampers certainly struck a
chord with the press. A flood of sympathetic articles appeared in its wake. We
were assured that, while not exactly a New Man, Gazza was clearly a new man.

Childishness of a different stamp also loomed large in Gazza’s Coming Home,
and while none of it came from Gascoigne junior it may well have an equal
bearing on the events that were to follow. Before the 1988 Cup Final clash with
Liverpool a Wimbledon player was asked about the atmosphere at Plough Lane.
“It’s brilliant,” he responded, “It’s just like being at school with all your
mates.”

A similarly gleeful affirmation was heard from Gazza when he was asked if being
a footballer meant that you never had to grow up. Like the Edwardian gentlemen
who wept over Peter Pan, it seems most players view adulthood with fear and
loathing. Their ideal is a land of japes and banter. The dormitories of Billy
Bunter and Winker Watson with the addition of sex and lager.

All of which wouldn’t matter a jot were it not for the fact that outside the
comfy confines of footieworld certain players find themselves facing problems
considerably more serious than running out of tuck during a midnight feast.

Sadly for Gascoigne, he is one of them. This
having-a-child-teaches-a-player-responsibility theory is a convenient one for
football since it requires no effort whatsoever on the part of the people who
run the game and frankly very little from the player himself either. Within a
week of the programme’s broadcast Gazza was back in the news again, this time
for assaulting his wife and kicking Winston Bogarde. It is hard to think of a
figure in history who has pissed away as much public goodwill as Paul
Gascoigne. Whenever things seem to be going swimmingly for him something
turns up and bursts his waterwings. At first it seemed like misfortune, but
after a while you begin to wonder. People in football are fond of remarking
that ‘you make your own luck in this game’. As someone once observed of the
equally self-destructive Scott Fitzgerald, there were times when you suspect
a fear of disaster has become a longing for it.

Gascoigne has often produced his best football in the most
terrible circumstances and he did so again, scoring with a superb free kick
against Aberdeen. While other talented players of the recent past have buckled
under pressure, Gascoigne has thrived in the kind of emotional chaos that would
have precluded most people from going into work at all.

It might be tempting, therefore,to see him as the footballing equivalent of the
Nick Nolte character in New York Stories – an artist who needs turmoil to
create his best work and so determinedly creates it – except that it’s hard to
see Gascoigne as a skilful manipulator of events. More it seems that when
times are bad, Gascoigne retreats into football.

But why are times so often so bad for Gazza? Partly it goes back to his childhood and a cast of characters who at times seem to have lurched from the pages of Viz.

The problem is compounded by the system in which British players operate. Team
spirit and camaraderie are viewed as essentials and so the atmosphere does
indeed become like a school: discipline comes from above, not from within; the
judgement of the peer group becomes paramount; excessive behaviour is viewed as
a good laugh; and if it gets out of hand the class groups together to protect
the guilty. “This may well make them stronger as a unit,” the pundits comment
after what is usually termed ‘an incident’. Often they are right. If it
correspondingly weakens them as individuals no-one seems too bothered.

The biggest difference between a school and a football team is that teachers,
unlike managers, aren’t reliant on the genius of one or two wayward pupils to
keep them in a job. When faced with a brilliant player who is in psychological
distress the thought must cross the manager’s mind that any treatment could result in the loss of the very spark that makes the player great. A lot of
money is invested in top footballers. They tend to be indulged.

The worst fear for Gazza’s apologists is that he will end up like the
British footballer with whom he is most frequently compared, George Best:
writing an autobiography every few years and being held up as a beacon of fun
and individualism from a happy, irresponsible age that has long since gone. He
will be a character, one whose comic misdeeds can be sniggeringly retold by pathetic
middle-aged men on TV specials.

The worry for the rest of us is that he will finish his days like another
mercurial Tyneside hero, the Scot, Hughie Gallacher, whose dazzling skills
brightened an inner darkness which would, when his career ended, quickly engulf
him.

At some point people within football need to face up to the fact there are far worse things that can happen to boys than merely growing up.

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About the Blogger

Harry Pearson is the author of The Far Corner and nine other works of non-fiction, including Slipless in Settle - winner of the 2011 MCC/Cricket Society Prize. From 1997 through to 2012 he wrote over 700 columns for the Guardian sports section. He has worked for When Saturday Comes since 1988.

About This Blog

When The Far Corner came out a well known football writer whose work I like and respect told me he been unable to finish it. Too much non-League. Too many howls of outrage in the lumpy rain of steeltown winters. Not enough rapture. ‘I’m only interested in the great stars, the great occasions,’ he said, ‘To me football is like opera.’

I don’t care much for opera. And so I have carried on much as I did before: writing about unsung people in rough places where the PA plays 'Sex on the Beach' in the coal-scented February fog and men with ill-advised hair bellow, 'Christ on a bike, this is the drizzling shits.'I could justify this with grandiosity. I could say Dickens and Balzac, Orwell and Zola were more interested in the lower divisions of society than its elite. I could tell you that the sportswriters I most admire are almost all Americans whose primary subject is boxing. AJ Liebling, WC Heinz, Thomas Hauser, Phil Berger and the rest inhabit a world where hucksters, gangsters, the desperate, the doomed and the mad hang out in stinking gyms and amidst the rattle of slot machines, and trainers such as Roger Mayweather say things like, "You don't need no strategy to fight Arturo Gatti. Close your eyes, throw your hands and you'll hit him in the fucking face."

But that is to be wise after the event. Norman Mailer said every writer writes what he can. It is not a choice. We play the cards we're dealt.

A few years ago I stood in a social club kitchen near Ashington listening to an old bloke named Bill talk about a time in the early 1950s when, on a windswept field at East Hirst, beneath anthracite sky, he’d watched a skinny blond teenager ‘float over that mud like a little angel’, glowing at the memory of Bobby Charlton.

Opera is pantomime for histrionic show offs, but this? This is true romance.

The First 30 Years features some new writing and lots of older pieces going back to the late-1980s. This work first appeared in When Saturday Comes, The Guardian, various other newspapers, fanzines and a number of those glossy men's lifestyle magazines that have women in bras on the cover. It is my intention over the next year or so to collect it all here, if for no other reason than to prove to my family that I did do some work every once in a while.

In keeping with the original rhythms of the game I'll post a new piece every Saturday (kick-off times may vary)

The best images here have been provided by a trio of the great photographers I've been lucky enough to work with over the years. I'm very grateful to Tim Hetherington, Colin McPherson, and Peter Robinson for letting me use their work - all of which is copyright of those individuals and cannot be reproduced without their permission.